Cutting Paper through Visualization and Collaboration
- by [email protected]
It's hard not to hear about "Going Green" these days. Many are working to be more environmentally conscious in their personal lives, and this has extended to the corporate world as well. I know I'm always looking for new ways.
Environmental responsibility is important at Oracle too, and we have an entire section of our website dedicated to our solutions around the Eco-Enterprise. You can check it out here: http://www.oracle.com/green/index.html
Perhaps the biggest and most obvious challenge in the world of business is the fact that we use so much paper. There are many good reasons why we print today too. For example:
Printing off a document, spreadsheet, or CAD design that will be reviewed and marked up while on a plane
Having a printout of a facility when a field engineer performs on-site maintenance
During a multi-party design review where a number of people will review a drawing in a meeting room, scribbling onto a large scale drawing print to provide their collaborative comments
These are just a few potential use cases, and they're valid ones. However, there's a way in which you can turn these paper processes into digital ones. AutoVue allows you to view, mark-up, and collaborate on all the data you would print. Indeed, this is the core of what AutoVue does. So if we take the examples above, we could address each as follows:
Allow you to view the document, spreadsheet, or CAD drawing in AutoVue on your laptop. Even if you originally had this data vaulted in some time of system of record (like an ECM solution) and view your data from there, AutoVue allows you to "Work Offline" and take the documents you need to review on your laptop. From there, the many annotation tools in AutoVue will give you what you need to comment upon the documents that you are reviewing.
The challenge with the mobile workforce is always access to information. People who perform maintenance and repair operations often are in locations with little to no Internet connectivity. However, technology is coming to these people in the form of laptops, tablet PCs, and other portable devices too. AutoVue can address situations with limited bandwidth through our streaming technology for viewing, meaning that the most up to date information can be pulled up from the central server - without the need for large data transfer. When there is no connectivity at all, the "Work Offline" option will handle this.
For a design review session, the Real-Time Collaboration capabilities of AutoVue will let all the participants view the same document in a synchronized view, allowing each person to be able to mark-up the document at the same time. Since this is done in a web-based manner, not only is it not necessary to print the document, but you benefit by reducing the travel needed for these sessions. Not only are trees spared, but jet fuel as well.
There are many steps involved with "Going Green", but each step is a necessary one. What we do today will directly influence our future generations, and we're looking to help.
